Peterkin Drops Milwaukee's 'Controlled Choice' Plan

Bowing to widespread opposition from parents, Milwaukee's
superintendent of schools has withdrawn his support for a "controlled
choice" student-assignment plan that would have reduced access to the
district's widely studied magnet schools.

"The community was just unable to buy into the concept" Robert S.
Peterkin said of his decision late last month to abandon the proposal
drafted by outside consultants. The plan closely resembled similar
systems implemented in Boston and Seattle in the current school year
and reflected ideas Mr. Peterkin helped pioneer when he was schools
chief in Cambridge, Mass.

The superintendent said he would submit a proposal to the school
board later this month that would focus on school improvement rather
than changes in the student-assignment policy.

The latter issue, he said, will be the focus of a special advisory
panel to be convened in the fall. The panel will be charged with
preparing a new proposal on student assignments by the end of the
coming school year.

Parents who had attended hearings on the consultants'
student-assignment plan "were extremely concerned" that the
school-improvement aspect of the plan be made stronger, Mr. Peterkin
said in an interview last week.

On the basis of that reaction, the superintendent rejected the
consultants' view that changes in the assignment process should precede
and drive improvements in district schools.

The proposal, prepared by Charles V. Willie, a professor of
education and urban studies at Harvard University, sought to address
inequities and confusion caused by the district's growing number of
magnet and specialty schools. (See Education Week, Feb. 28, 1990.)

It recommended that traditional neighborhood-school assignments be
eliminated and all students be required to choose from schools located
in one of two large attendance zones. Access to the specialty schools
in each zone would have been restricted to students from that zone.

The plan also had sought to reduce total busing costs, decrease the
disproportionate burden of busing on black students, and create a
mechanism for school-based improvements in schools that failed to
attract racially balanced enrollments.

Access to Magnet Schools

Mr. Peterkin, who collaborated with Mr. Willie on the Cambridge
controlled-choice program, said many parents had feared that the
division of the district into two zones would deny their children
access to certain magnet schools.

"Without the quality schools on both sides of the line," he said,
''they felt they would be closed out of whatever they wanted."

But Mr. Willie said in an interview last week that "student
assignment and school improvement go hand in hand." He described Mr.
Peterkin's decision to separate the two processes as "a fundamental
error in the diagnosis for improvement of schools in Milwaukee."

"If you pull away from the fairness agenda, you will have hell on
your hands," Mr. Willie warned Mr. Peterkin in a letter dated June
1.

The letter said that while Seattle had met with fierce resistance to
its decision to go ahead with a controlled-choice plan, the debate
there appears to have subsided in recent months with the staging of
neighborhood and citywide summits on educational goals. (See Education
Week, May 30, 1990.)

The Milwaukee superintendent said he would address the issue of
student assignment by asking his advisory panel to consider
recommendations that the district pair or cluster schools to enhance
desegregation; establish new attendance zones to decrease the distances
students are transported; and develop criteria for effective schools
that would be used to judge whether schools need to be
restructured.

Also on the panel's agenda, he said, will be recommendations to
define desegregation in broader terms, as a way of reducing high
concentrations of low-income and low-ability students in certain
schools, and to develop new policies for assigning siblings and
kindergarten students.

In the short term, Mr. Peterkin said, he will ask the board to take
immediate steps to revise current funding mechanisms and increase the
amount of money available for school improvement.

He also will seek to revise the procedures by which parents choose
their children's schools and appeal school assignments they do not
like.

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